My second daughter, like my first daughter at age one, likes to pull my books off my bookshelves and strew them about the floor. I glanced at the carpet today and noticed there one of the books I was introduced to during my spiritual direction training, Miriam Greenspan's Healing Through the Dark Emotions. Apart from having found the next book to put on my to-read list, I've also been reminded that the dark emotions--grief, fear, and despair--have the power to teach, to transform, and to heal.

As I've continued to discern my vocation from God, I have come to a new awareness: if I am to be a Benedictine Canon or a priest or any other thing, I must release every motivation to do so that is driven by grief, fear, or despair. My vocation cannot belong to grief, fear, or despair. It must belong to love.

That isn't to say I must become perfect before I become what I am called to be, because no one would be able to embrace her vocation if perfection were a prerequisite. It is rather to say that my call must resound in the key of love. My grief, fear, and despair teach me what is dissonant in the key of love, and their dissonance bears its own beauty. But love is ultimately the sound I seek; love is the sound of God's beckoning voice.

The psalms appointed for morning prayer in The Book of Common Prayer today included Psalm 44, and I couldn't help but think of the girls kidnapped in Nigeria with these words on their lips:We have heard with our ears, O God, our ancestors have told us,what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old: you with your own hand drove out the nations, but them you planted;you afflicted the peoples, but them you set free; for not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory;but your right hand, and your arm, and the light of your countenance, for you delighted in them.

You are my King and my God; you command victories for Jacob. Through you we push down our foes; through your name we tread down our assailants. For not in my bow do I trust, nor can my sword save me. But you have saved us from our foes, and have put to confusion those who hate us. In God we have boasted continually, and we will give thanks to your name for ever. Yet you have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies. You made us turn back from the foe, and our enemies have taken spoil for themselves. You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations. You have sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them. You have made us the taunt of our neighbors, the derision and scorn of those around us. You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughing-stock among the peoples. All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face at the words of the taunters and revilers, at the sight of the enemy and the avenger. All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten you, or been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way, yet you have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness. If we had forgotten the name of our God, or spread out our hands to a strange god, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart. Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. And as the final words of this psalm come around, I can't help but think that the hands and feet and deeds they seek from God are the ones given by God to me--and you.Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off for ever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. How will I use my God-given hands and feet--how will I use my freedom to act--for the liberation of those who are, at this very moment, horrifically oppressed?Here's a statement about the Nigerian girls from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori given on behalf of the Episcopal Church, and here's a link to the call for submissions for the anthology that will be published in honor of the girls (whose proceeds will go to notforsalecampaign.org)

My spiritual director recently invited me to make a graph of the losses I've experienced throughout my life. She invited me to mark losses as being either negative or positive (by drawing marking them below or above the timeline, respectively), and to indicate how great each loss was at the time by the length of the mark. The result of this graph is the ability to see the frequency, kinds, and impacts of my losses all at once, as well as my coping mechanisms (or lack thereof) for those losses.I drafted my grief graph last night. I already knew intuitively that my life had been marked by loss, but it startled me to see just how much there was. Death has been my life's companion. Major changes have been my life's normal rhythm. And deep happiness took quite a while to come along, but has been growing exponentially since it arrived. I still have a difficult time trusting deep happiness when it emerges in a new form, and given this picture of my past, it's no wonder.What can my past losses tell me about my future? What patterns are discernible in them, and what in those patterns needs gentle, healing illumination?

During evening prayer yesterday, I read the lection from the gospel according to Mark of the three women going to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body:When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.I wonder what the three women experienced as they walked toward the tomb of the one they so deeply loved. Heartache? Shock? Disbelief? Unrelenting grief? Were they stoic, determined to make the best of it, to do the tasks prescribed and move on? And when they discovered that the tomb was empty, and that this young man in white was sitting next to the tomb, telling them their beloved had been raised from death, I wonder what they feared most. Would they be blamed? What could this mean? If he wasn't in the tomb, then where was he?This morning, a friend of mine from theology school quoted Henri Nouwen, one of the gentlest voices of Christian spirituality from the twentieth century: "The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will never get lost."In moments when my faith is strained to its limits, how strong is my belief that what belongs to God will never get lost?

As I awoke this morning from a night of grief-laced sleep, the first three verses of this hymn, whose words were written by Jean Janzen, spilled from me:I sing to you from summers of my heartMy voice a field of surge and greeningMy roots established in the long-lit hoursYour presence in the throbbingI sing when fullness burnishes my dayThe mellow spices of completionThe harvest of my life in you which yieldsA juice of joy and feastingBut when in silence nothing rises upInto my soul, and I am frozenWhen iron days refuse to split and thawThe clutch of ice to flowingI struggled to remember the final verse all morning, till it came to me just now:Then give me faith that warmth will swell the bud to song, which like a leaf will openFor from the urgings of your steadfast loveThere flows my truest singingEaster's Aurora draws near.

I have grieved the deaths of many people I love. Grieving death, when love for the one who has died is great, hurts. The hurt can be so searing that the griever seeks to shut out her grief: she buries it, hiding it so she doesn't have to face it.What isn't obvious to the griever is that hiding grief isn't the same as letting it go. Hiding allows the grief to blossom deep within me. It becomes a weed, claiming good soil for itself and choking to death the good that has been cultivated within me.In my personal effort to grieve a death I've never grieved, I have had to dig deep within myself to grasp at my grief's roots. That grasping has taken the form of many words--as I give voice to the grief, its shape becomes distinct from the now-hardened soil in which it dwells, and I can grasp it with gradually increasing ease.In what ways will I have to embrace my grief before it releases its hidden grip on me?

Suppose someone shines a light in your face. Do you turn from it, or do you let it illumine you for the other to see? What if the light is so bright it hurts your eyes? What if there is no light anywhere around you except that which is shining on you?My toddler does this. She'll find our emergency LED flashlights tucked away, pull them out, turn them on, and shine them in our eyes till her daddy and I remind her not to do it, since doing that can give people ow-ies.During spiritual direction yesterday, my spiritual director held up a lone flame to illumine part of my past that was buried deep within me--old, strong grief with old, strong power. She invited me to consider seeking therapy to work through it. My inability to withhold tears as I considered my grief confirmed that she was right.Lent is a time for digging through one's deepest darkness--not to find new ways to bury it, but to hold it up to light and embrace it with the fierce grip of love.Will I be able to bear the tears that come as I face this old darkness? Will I trust others to gather me up when I release both my tears and my strength to stand?